'We are repeatedly told that consumer spending is all-important for the economy.' Photograph: Scott Barbour/Getty

What is happiness? Although it might seem an inappropriate time to discuss such an obscure and intangible thing – what with rising unemployment, public sector cuts and a noticeable jump in the cost of living – there has been a flurry of interest in the topic recently. Action for Happiness, which has just launched, argues for a "new science of happiness" that focuses on social behaviour and personal relationships, rather than material possessions and outward appearance. The coalition government, like the Labour government before it, has flirted with the idea that collecting data on "subjective wellbeing" could become a central policy feature – perhaps leading it to avoid trickier questions such as, say, objective job-provision.

Unfortunately for David Cameron, and perhaps for the rest of us, happiness appears to be somewhat more complex than simply something we might abstractly desire. Even more unfortunately, Cameron's source for his happiness policy, Professor Martin Seligman, appears to have substantially revised his position, replacing "happiness" (too subjective, too vague) with the idea of "flourishing" (what we need is not a narrow definition of happiness, but a recognition that we are also interested in meaning and justice, and always were).

Seligman is tapping into a long history of thinking about what it might mean to live well, and to achieve certain goals that go far beyond simply the accumulation of material wealth or social status. In recent years, professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago Martha Nussbaum (alongside economist Amartya Sen) has taken up the Aristotelian idea that the goal of philosophy is human flourishing and applied it to immediate questions of global social justice. We are all possessed of certain "capabilities", she argues, ways of doing and being that we value, and she says public policy should prioritise and enable these, rather than obsessing over GNP per capita as a mark of a country's "success" (states can be technically very rich, but extremely socially unjust – Nussbaum points to South Africa as an example).

Nussbaum's list of capabilities is open to expansion, and is based on "a broad and ongoing cross-cultural inquiry". What people value, regardless of where they live, she argues, falls into 10 rough categories: life; bodily health; bodily integrity; thought and sensation (including imagination); emotions; practical reason (forming a conception of the good for oneself); affiliation (friendship and respect); a positive relation to nature; play; and political and material control over one's environment.

While Nussbaum's list may be broad, her definition of what people care about, based on careful and lengthy enquiry, reveals that there is so much more to life than pining after happiness – indeed, pining after happiness might be the very thing that makes us miserable, especially if we cannot achieve it (remember that the US declaration of independence promises only the "pursuit" of happiness, rather than its realisation). Psychologist and journalist, Oliver James, has pointed out that "affluenza", the addiction to economic growth and personal material gain, often results in high levels of disappointment and depression: you cannot profit or buy your way into joy (the practical redistribution of wealth may, on the other hand, be an extremely jubilant thing indeed).

But what does all this mean for the way we measure social and personal wellbeing? We are repeatedly told that consumer spending is all-important for the economy; that without enough of it, confidence will "wilt", retailers "slump" and the Bank of England will have to perform some sort of "difficult balancing act", as if running some kind of miserable circus sideshow.

Since it was decreed a few decades ago that capitalism would have to expand by selling people things they didn't need, rather than have them replace things when they wore out, we have been coerced into thinking about quality of life in terms of owning and accumulating more things. And even if housing bubbles and credit card debt end up punishing those people who can afford it least, the ruling and financial classes (too often the same thing) can turn round and say "well, it was your fault, your choice, no one made you take out one (or many) loans/mortgages/overdrafts".

Despite the crisis, it seems clear that we haven't moved far enough away from this impoverished economic moralism – the idea that we are supposed to care more if the economy is depressed rather than the people who work for it. Is our role merely to be consumers to stimulate a miserable financial system? To work hard in increasingly absent jobs only so we can bail out the retailers? Rather than prop up pernicious and Orwellian slogans such as the "big society", we need to seize the means of the production of wellbeing – those things we already value that go far beyond the accumulation of wealth or material possessions – and make a society out of that instead.